If my mother were on her way to Black Mountain, I might head south myself, and the four of us, three generations, would come together for a brief spell as a family.
Would it be wrong to remember those as happy times? Is it perverse to imagine, to believe, that she, in her struggle to live, in her nearly dying, took care of us?
Of all the stories from that era in my mother’s life — the era in which I found myself perpetually on call, waiting for bad or good news from Florida or from North Carolina — one stands out. This is the story of the time she came closest to drinking herself to death.
In the spring of 1983, she finished a monthlong detoxification at South Miami Hospital, in Coral Gables. The patients on the ward were diverse. One was an emaciated man with a long beard. He’d spent his life in the Everglades drinking whiskey. Another, a Cuban man with an enormous belly who’d worked as a baggage handler at the airport, had, each day on the job, while loading and unloading suitcases from conveyer belts and motorized carts, drunk two to three cases of beer. I remember my mother telling me that he had a wife and baby. There was a young blond guy who’d made and lost a fortune as a cocaine dealer; until entering the hospital, he’d carried thousands of dollars in his pockets. And I remember an aeronautical engineer who’d retired to the Florida Keys. According to my mother, he later piloted a plane of his own design into the Gulf of Mexico.
But that’s not the story I mean to tell. The story I’m thinking of begins on a Saturday night in New York. I was with friends at the Madison Pub, a bar on the Upper East Side. It was early, still light out. We’d ordered a round of drinks — I was nursing a Manhattan, of all things — and it crossed my mind to call my mother and see how she was getting on. There was a pay phone at the rear of the bar. I excused myself, went back, and dialed her number. It was a collect call. Her phone rang a dozen times before the operator broke in and suggested that I try later. I rejoined my friends but could not enjoy myself. Eventually I went home to my apartment, where I called her again. The phone rang and rang. I’m not sure why I did not assume — it would have been logical — that she was out for the evening. Why did I let the phone ring? I was right, though. She picked up.
I waited for her voice.
“Mom? Are you there? Mom?”
After a long moment, she made a crying noise. The receiver clattered — did she drop it? — and the line disconnected. It was a few minutes past eight o’clock. I called my grandfather in Black Mountain and explained to him that I had to go to Miami.
“Tonight,” I said.
At that time in my life I could not have considered any possibility but going to her, yet could not have afforded plane fare without his help. He promised that he would have a ticket waiting at La Guardia airport. I phoned my mother again, and her answering machine picked up. After the beep, I cried, “I’m coming, Mom!” I threw some shirts in a suitcase, locked the apartment behind me, and ran down the stairs, out of the building, and into the street, where I collided with a taxi. I bounced off its side as it rolled to a stop, and a rear tire almost ran over my foot. I jumped into the back and asked to be taken to the airport as fast as possible. The driver turned and asked, “Hey, are you all right?” and I panted, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” I rolled down the window and took deep breaths of air. At the airport, I ran to the counter of the airline my grandfather always used. The ticket was waiting. At the gate, the flight was boarding. We took off shortly after ten, and, sometime around one o’clock, the plane landed in Miami. I waited for my suitcase to appear on the baggage carousel, then went to the taxi stand, got a taxi, and gave the driver my mother’s address. As I remember things now, she was living in an apartment that I had never before visited. But is this right? Surely, on earlier trips, I had stayed with her in the very place that I was now speeding toward. Have my memories converged to make some new, universal memory? The taxi headed south, then west. After thirty minutes, we stopped at a newly built duplex townhouse, one in a series of identical two-story buildings on a numbered street in a nondescript neighborhood. I paid the driver, grabbed my luggage, and started up the walkway. The lights were on in my mother’s house, and the front door was hanging open. Strange. Had she heard my voice when, earlier in the night, I called to her through her phone answering machine? Had she left the door open for me? Near the entryway stood a couple of empty wine bottles. They looked as if they’d been set out for the milkman. Bottles lay on their sides on the living-room floor. More stood on the kitchen counters. I stood in the brightly lit living room, calling, “Mom? Mom?” It was two in the morning and the house smelled awful. The kitty litter had not been changed, and my mother’s white cat, Flora, had shat on the carpet. “Mom?” I called, and heard movement overhead, a footstep.
She was at the top of the stairs.
I saw her feet. Then I saw the hem of her nightgown. She came down one step at a time. Little by little, she appeared. She held the bannister. She lowered herself halfway down the stairs and, with both feet on one step, and with her hands gripping the railing, turned to peer out over the living room.
She looked to the left and the right, and up and down, slowly. “Mom, it’s me,” I said, but she did not seem to hear.
“Mom?”
“Who?” she whispered.
As my mother aged, and particularly during the period when she was sick with cancer, I would grow accustomed to seeing her frightened, or helpless, or frail; she could look, at times, like a stranger to me. That night, I had the feeling that she was, even as she stood on the stairs, dying. What did she see, looking at me? She did not see me. I don’t remember how many times I said, “It’s me, Mom,” before she turned and, tugging with her arms against the bannister, went back up the stairs. It was as if my arrival had been part of her dreams, or as if she’d heard a noise, come down to investigate, and found nothing. After a moment, I heard her walking overhead. I followed her up the steps.
She was lying in bed, shivering. I pulled the sheet and bedspread over her. Beginning with her hands, one, then the other, I re-created, from memory, the massage she’d given me when I was a boy in Tallahassee and I’d had my asthma attacks. She had come into my room and whispered, “Easy, honey. You’re going to be all right. I’m here.” She would massage my back, my arms, and my hands, pressing her thumbs into my palms, then kneading her way up my arms to my shoulders. She pounded my shoulder blades and my back, in order to loosen the congestion blocking my lungs. Before she finished, she would retrace her movements and hold my hands in hers once more. I remember feeling that she was squeezing the fear right out of me, pushing my distress down my arms and out my fingertips; and I remember that my panic would subside when she held me, and, as the asthma pills took effect, and even as my breathing remained difficult, I could close my eyes and sleep.
That night in Miami, her hands were clenched — I had to pry them open — and she was sweating. Her skin, her unwashed nightgown, the damp sheets on the bed, the room itself, smelled of alcohol and nicotine. I rubbed her neck and shoulders, and lightly pressed the heels of my hands against her back. Later in the night she became aware of who I was, and, in a few quiet words, let me know that she’d been hallucinating. Dragons and other monsters flew at her from the corners of her bedroom. I remember looking around, trying to picture her visions. What would it be like to watch black serpents crawl from behind a chair or a dresser? I sat beside her on the bed and whispered to her that I wouldn’t let the monsters hurt her.
Sometime after four, she slept. I got up, turned off the light, and closed the bedroom door. No, I must have left the door open a tiny bit, just in case. I went downstairs and cleaned the dishes she’d left in the sink and on the counters. I changed the cat litter and put new food and fresh water in the bowls on the kitchen floor. I gathered bottles and threw them in the trash. There were over twenty. She’d had them delivered.